


Lemon Cakes

by thequeenmeera



Series: And So We Have Each Other [3]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, I'm including the rape warning because it's suggested as having happened in the past, One Shot, Other characters are mentioned but none appear, there is no rape scene don't worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 08:12:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19058722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thequeenmeera/pseuds/thequeenmeera
Summary: Sansa is moving into a new place and Arya comes to help her





	Lemon Cakes

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this piece for a long time and finally got pulled together enough to post it!  
> This piece takes place sometime before the second chapter of the main fic.

The apartment was decent enough. Older, smaller, shabbier than the one she’d had at the Eyrie but it felt so much cleaner than her old one with Dr. Baelish being gone. Behind bars. She felt cleaner now that he was put away and Joffrey was six feet under thanks to that accident with the bad clams. She’d yet to unpack and the orders she’d already gotten were draped over and around the boxes and chairs and tables. She had to partition Lady into one half of the apartment and keep all the orders and the couch in the dining room. Her brothers were coming by in the morning to help her unpack it all.

It was when Sansa was trying to decipher the instructions on the back of a box of pasta that the buzzer rang and in the time it took to answer, realize it was her sister of all people trying to get in, unlocking the door, and running back to the kitchen the box caught fire. She’d set it too close to the stove and the boiling water. Arya banged her way into the apartment with her arms full of bags and something large and apparently wooden strapped to her back to see her usually dignified older sister crying and fighting a kitchen fire with a hand towel instead of turning the knob on the gas stove. She had to carefully deposit the bags before rushing to help her sister.

“Shit, Sansa why’d you leave the box there?” Arya yelled while she ran to help with a lid.

“I didn’t think it was that close!” Sansa sobbed while Arya covered the burning box with the lid and turned the stove off. Sansa let her sister clean up and order food while she hunted down the Kleenex and dabbed her face with a cool cloth.

“So, why did you come up here tonight?” She asked Arya when they settled at the cluttered table with their food. “I thought you’d be on a date with Gendry?” Her sister certainly wasn’t dressed for a date with her paint-splattered jeans, canvas shoes, and baggy blue tee shirt. Her dark shoulder-length hair had been tied into a high ponytail. Or she wasn’t dressed for the sort of dates Sansa was used to.

Arya shrugged nonchalantly, “Turns out Gendry is one of Myrcella’s half-brothers.”

Sansa nearly choked on her noodles, “What? I mean I’m not that surprised, I always thought he looked like Robert, but are they sure?”

“Yeah, they did all the tests. So Myrcella is hosting some big weekend get-together. She’s roped all of the siblings she’s found into coming and meeting each other. Gendry already knew Mya and Bella of course. They found out they were siblings a while back they just didn’t know who their father was exactly.”

“Gendry used to live with Mya right?” Sansa wasn’t sure she remembered his history right, there’d been a lot of it told over the family dinner where the Starks had all met him and Gendry had to be prompted into talking most of the time.

Arya nodded, “She took him in for a bit, yeah. She’s the closest thing he has to a mom since he lost his so long ago.”

There was an awkward pause and they both sipped at their drinks, trying to think of what to say next. Conversation that wasn’t an argument had never been easy with them. “So,” Arya started again, her voice a bit high-pitched, “how are you? Do you like this place?”

Sansa thought through her answer carefully, “I’m doing much better thanks. It’s quiet and White Harbor is a lot cleaner than King’s Landing and more… homey than the Eyrie.”

The Eyrie that had been so silent, oppressive. The residents all cold, aloof, suspicious people who still hadn’t cared that the Sociology Department Dean was manipulating one of his students into letting him fuck her. Sansa thanked the gods every day that her mother was such a good lawyer and that the jury had taken pity on her because she really hadn’t known anything until it was used as blackmail and the murders weren’t her fault. Still, it wasn’t as if she could have stayed there in that stone edifice that felt like a tomb where the only people to talk to were the nation’s most ambitious young people and the most corrupt teachers. Where every day she’d wake up and breathe in the cold, thin air and feel the weight of a mountain of stone ready to crash down upon her. If she didn’t find a therapist in the next week her mother would pull her support from the business.

“Sansa,” Arya was staring pointedly at her, an eyebrow raised.

Sansa followed her sister’s gaze and saw the sauce that had flicked onto her shirt while Sansa was caught in bad memories. “Oh,” she said lamely and went to change her shirt. She chose an old, worn one that she wouldn’t mind getting dirty. One of the shirts she’d set aside for cleaning, painting, and moving into the new apartment.

The sight of the shirt made Arya frown, “A JTA shirt?” she asked. The hurt was right there in her sister’s stormy gray eyes.

Tears stung her eyes when old, latent guilt stuck her “I didn’t put it on to upset you, it was just on hand.”

“I wasn’t attacking you,” Arya said though her tone was subdued and guarded.

Sansa tucked back into her seat, “I know. But I guess this is as good a time as any to say that I’m sorry for what happened there.”

Arya’s frown deepened, “You’re talking as if you had nothing to do with it.”

Sansa bowed her head and went back through the sequence of events.

When their dad had been appointed Hand of the King their mother hadn’t wanted to move to King’s Landing. She was happy in Winterfell and didn’t want to uproot their children’s lives, or at least she didn’t want to uproot the boys. Robb was supposed to stick with Northern concerns rather than serving all of Westeros. Jon was preparing to enter military school. Bran was confined in a wheelchair and had to go for surgeries and even with the argument that he’d have better care in the south neither Bran nor their mother wanted to permanently relocate south. Rickon was happiest in the backwoods and cried whenever they took him into the city, King’s Landing would suffocate him their parents agreed.

Sansa on the other hand had been ecstatic at the idea of moving and getting to be around Joffrey, the dreamboat son of the King. Back then she hadn’t been able to see what was going on beneath that shining blonde hair and charming grin. Or she hadn’t wanted to see it even when he showed it to her.  

Their mother had agreed to let the girls go to Jaeherys Targaryen Academy, an old and well-established boarding school outside of King’s Landing. The school was technically co-ed, though the girls lived, ate, and did their school-required recreation in Alysanne Hall and the boys were in Jaeherys Hall.

Shenanigans always ensued even with constant supervision. There were ways to get past the adults and the grounds were large. Sansa had been on a walk with Joffrey one day, down by the river. It was the first time they’d held hands and Sansa had been hoping he might kiss her, just maybe if her plans for a picnic and a romantic jaunt along the riverbank went well. Though in retrospect she knew it never would have happened it had taken until recently for her to fully accept the truth about who and what Joffrey was and what a fool she’d been.

Her plans had soured as soon as they’d run across Arya playing in water with her friend Mycah. A poor boy from Fleabottom – what people tended to call the poor area of King’s Landing – who had gotten a scholarship to JTA. They were trying and failing to skip rocks and playing at sword fights with sticks. Joffrey had gotten the most sickening grin when he saw them, “Is that your boyfriend horseface?” he’d shouted at Arya as soon as he figured out who it was.

Arya had dropped a rock in the water and turned, glaring. “Don’t call me that!” she’d snapped, “And he’s not my boyfriend.”

“You’re playing with him in the river, I thought it was just couples who went down to the river together,” Joffrey had said as he’d approached, strutting along the bank.

Arya had scoffed but Mycah’s ears had turned red, “Leave us alone Joffrey,” Arya had said.

“How about you give me something I want and I won’t tell anyone that I caught you down here with your boyfriend?”

“He’s _not_ my boyfriend and nobody cares if I was down here with a friend boy or not.”

Sansa couldn’t see Joffrey’s face at that point but he’d gotten close to Arya and Mycah and she could hear the hiss of his breath. “I could make life very hard for you Stark, and for your little friend. Do you know how easy it is for trash like him to lose their scholarships? Just one toe out of line and he’s on the street.”

Arya’s face had darkened, she took a step forward. “You leave Mycah alone. He hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“He’s breaking school rules right now Stark,” Joffrey said as he took another step forward then snatched at Mycah’s shirt, pulling him forward. The boy had yelped and the force of Joffrey’s tug made him fall onto the rocks. Mycah had yelled in pain when his face smashed into a boulder and Arya had struck, throwing herself at Joffrey. At first Sansa had stood frozen watching the sudden twist in her afternoon then, as Arya and Joffrey had rolled, flailing into the water she’d started to scream. She still wasn’t sure who had held who under the water, trying to drown the other but if she was being honest Arya’s defense that it had been Joffrey trying to kill her was the only logical conclusion.

Back in the present Sansa bowed her head and scraped at a spot of drying sauce on the table. “I didn’t _do_ anything.”

“Until the meeting when you claimed I was the one who tried to kill Joffrey when you know it was the other way around. The one that ended with Mycah losing his scholarship despite being attacked and his mom couldn’t afford the medical bills for his broken nose. And I got kicked out of the school, that’s on my permanent record by the way. I was told I was lucky I wasn’t being taken to court and you took his side.”

“And I’m _sorry_ , I’m sorry about that.”

There was surprise behind her sister’s walls, “Really?”

“Of course I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure what I saw and I didn’t want to think that Joffrey was, was –”

“– a monster?”

“Yeah. I should have known then but I can assure you I know now.”

“And everything else?”

Sansa picked up her fork and twirled her noodles around it, “I can’t very well change the past but yeah I’m really sorry about hurting you and Mycah.”

“Thanks.”

They finished their meal and threw out their paper and plastic dishes in near silence. It was up to Sansa to break it; that was clear. “So, what do you want to do tonight?” she asked her sister at last.

“Well that’s up to you isn’t it?”

“I guess I just, don’t know what you were planning on when you came up here.”

Arya looked around at the apartment which was in disarray, “I thought I could help you get a head start on cleaning or unpacking or whatever.”

It was still early in the evening and they agreed to just pull through so they got to work moving boxes out of the kitchen and bathrooms so they could be scrubbed down then Sansa took Lady with her when she went for coffees and energy drinks at the coffee shop around the corner while Arya dug out a stereo, turned the radio onto an oldies station, and pulled out the cleaning supplies she’d bought.

Arya scrubbed and scraped burned box and pasta off the counter and the edge of the stove while Sansa detailed the toilets – knowing she’d have to clean them off tomorrow what with her father and brothers and cousins and uncles all coming to help out – but it would only be a quick scrub down. The more they scrubbed the dirtier it seemed the apartment was. Arya used half of the bottle of degreaser on the cabinets alone before she took to them with a rough sponge and dish soap. In the bathrooms Sansa was using up an incredible amount of vinegar to get the hard water off the shower doors.

When Arya moved the oven and the refrigerator out from their spots to sweep under them she nearly threw up. “So that’s what I was smelling!” she shouted.

“What?” Sansa asked, rushing into the kitchen rubber gloves covered in suds and the hair she’d been working out of the shower drain. She did throw up.

Arya carefully removed the half-cooked dead mice from their nest, throwing out her gloves with them, and took the trash out while Sansa tried to vacuum the bugs and the hair to no avail. There was grease or some sort of sticky substance that had trapped so much stuff. They maneuvered the oven further out of its place and with great difficulty managed to get the thing down the stairs and set it next to the dumpster. “Are you sure your landlord isn’t going have a cow over this?”

Sansa snorted, “I don’t care if he does; that was disgusting.” She took a picture of the oven and sent it to the group chat now called “The Wolves of Winterfell” courtesy of Bran. She captioned the picture with “Found dead mice cooked to the bottom of this.”

There were new messages and pictures on the chat, Sansa had turned off her notifications. “Oh look there’s new pictures of Sybbie!” She tried and failed not to squeal.

Robb’s daughter Sybel, or “Sybbie” as they all called her, had been conceived thanks to IVF after nearly two years of Robb and Jeyne trying desperately to conceive. She was small and round with rosy red cheeks and a dusting of her mother’s chestnut brown hair.

Despite how cute the baby was in the picture of the whole family Sansa could still see some shadow in her brother’s eyes, some hint of unhappiness that he buried deep. “Hey, Arya do you think Robb looks unhappy?” She asked as they climbed back up the stairs.

“He’s been unhappy pretty much since he and Jeyne got together.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Uh, it’s pretty obvious isn’t it? He started dating her because he felt guilty about sleeping with her. I won’t be surprised if it all comes to a head soon. Now that he doesn’t have making a baby to focus on and they couldn’t have been having sex for a few months and all that stress. I bet they’ll be separated within six months. At least on the rocks.”

“Arya!” Sansa turned to look at her sister, “Shouldn’t you at least be hoping they work things out?”

Arya gave an exasperated sigh, “They don’t work together. Sure it’ll be great for them if things work out but I just don’t see it happening.”

“That’s terrible!”

“I’m just being realistic. It’s not like I’m trying to break them up, I’m just telling you my observations because you asked.”

Arya looked about for a change of subject and noticed the garment bags piled about the dining room “So what are you doing with all those clothes anyway?”

“Oh um, it’s my new business. I’m starting with some simple tailoring but if I get enough clientele I’ll start doing custom clothing.”

“Huh,” Arya chewed her lip, “So you’re not going back to academia or politics?”

“No, I never really liked either one anyway.”

They went back to the kitchen where they carefully wiped up the mess of whatever-it-was hair and bug-filled goo from the oven’s space and behind the fridge. Arya changed radio stations and started on wall wiping while Sansa went back to the bathrooms after letting Lady out to go potty. Nymeria had been left with their parents for the weekend. Sansa danced, or wiggled and head-bobbed, to the music by herself as she scrubbed down the sinks and cleaned the drains as best she could. She wanted to say she felt like a regular Jonquil or Jenny, common women who became ladies, or at least the object of a dreamy prince’s desires. Although when she thought about it that way the stories didn’t seem half as good and she knew her sister would point out that flaw.

By the time every nook and cranny in the apartment had been scrubbed clean, at least everything they could reach or cared about, it was near eleven at night. Sansa collapsed on the lemon-scented pine floors, Arya laid down at an angle to her, their hair flicked into the same space. “I think I’m going to be smelling bleach for the rest of my life,” Sansa said.

“Same.”

“I’m hungry,” Sansa groaned. She was usually in bed by this hour.

“Again, same.”

“Did you bring any more food?”

“Just ingredients. I thought we’d be able to cook. Pity the mice made that impossible.”

“Please don’t talk about that, I might throw up again.”

Arya shifted into a sitting position, “Oh, yeah that’s probably why you’re so hungry.”

“You really don’t have anything to eat?”

“Sure if you want to eat straight lemons.”

Sansa sat up, “What were you going to use lemons for?”

“Lemon cake of course!”

“Oh, now I want lemon cake,” Sansa threw herself back to the floor.”

Arya stood up and held out her hand to help her sister up, “We could buy some. There’s gotta be a bakery around here.”

“It’s nearly midnight none of them will be open.”

“Well are there any coffee shops open this late? Diners? There should be someplace we can find a lemon cake or a lemon tart or whatever.”

“Let me see what’s open…” Sansa said as she pulled her phone out of her pocket.

Which was how Sansa ended up exploring White Harbor at night, visiting every coffe shop, doughnut joint, and diner that happened to be open that late, and buying whatever lemon-flavored pastries they had on hand.

Sansa had never felt closer to her sister before, not since before Sansa had started school which was before Arya could remember. There were only clips from ancient home videos to prove that they had gotten along fine as toddlers. Usually teaming up to torment baby Bran before Arya and Bran had joined forces against her.

The last time Sansa had had a night out on the town it had been with Joffrey and it had not gone well. She pushed the memory aside and followed her sister to the first bakery to open that morning where they bought actual lemon cakes to go along with the bags of other pastries they’d been carrying all night.

The sky had turned from black, shot through with glittering stars, to a dull gray. Tinged with light on the horizon from the sun. Sansa sat cross-legged on a bench on the pier next to her sister while they feasted on their lemon cakes and lemon breads and lemon loaves and lemon-filled doughnuts and lemon tarts and lemon everything except for the strong, hot coffee they’d picked up just by the pier. The sun took its time rising over the waves and the world turned to shades of brilliant blue and gold.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope y'all enjoyed. I've already got an idea for another Sansa one-shot in this series. We'll see if it goes anywhere.


End file.
